The Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown, including its travel ban for six Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and shake up of the H-1B visa program for temporary workers, together with pressures to eliminate federal arts agencies, downsize and slash the budget of the Department of State (responsible for managing long-standing and successful cultural exchange programs), all paint a bleak picture for anyone who cares about the cultural promise of US internationalism. Instead Trumpists stumble along tacitly embracing an anti-globalist foreign policy of nativist populism untroubled by any expectation of cultural engagement as a robust component of international affairs. Alarmed foreign affairs experts regularly point to the destruction Trump’s policies are visiting upon once-celebrated US soft power – we are already seeing a notable decline in the number of international students applying to US colleges – and to a counterproductive return of “clash of civilizations” thinking, which celebrates the inevitability of polarizing cultural divides even as it ignores the myriad of ways diverse cultural projects constructively cross boundaries and build relationships.

Iran is a good illustration of the potential damage of Trump’s short-sighted nativism. Iran is of course among six countries singled out by his proposed ban – the others are Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. The ban jeopardizes what seemed a nascent change during the Obama years in the footing of the US-Iranian relationship since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, best illustrated by the Iranian nuclear deal. If in geopolitical terms we are used to hearing about Iran as part of the “axis of evil,” the US also boasts the largest Iranian diaspora in the world, with well over 1 million. Particularly with the immediacy of the digital era, an insightful recent book by Brian Edwards, who writes about the circulation of US culture in international contexts, documents how a fascination of Iranians with increasingly available American popular culture, cinema, literature, and academe, has substantially grown in recent years. Making novel uses of US and other global cultural content, Iranian artists have been producing some notably intercultural works.

Asghar Farhadi’s play, “The Salesman,” received significant attention in the US media earlier this year, in part because it won the 2017 Academy Award for best foreign language film, but also because Farhadi boycotted the Oscars to protest Trump’s controversial travel ban. And Farhadi’s has been among the voices of Iranian artists in the US, Iran and elsewhere, pushing back against Trump’s misguided policy – emphasizing its negative consequences for non-US citizen artists, the ways it undermines international cultural exchanges and artistic collaborations of all shapes and sizes. In his Academy Awards speech, read in absentia, Farhadi denounced the ascendancy of cultural “hard-liners” in the US and Iran, and their promotion of fear-driven “us and them” enmities in the name of nationalism and national security.

Farhadi’s cinematic work, epitomized by “The Salesman,” runs in a very different direction from such nativisms, embracing instead the creative and mutually illuminating potential of intercultural dialogue. “The Salesman” takes the form of a play within a play, following the travails of a married couple, both actors, who are rehearsing for a run of Arthur Miller’s iconic American play, “Death of a Salesman” in Tehran. As famously epitomized by Willy Loman, Miller’s play is often treated – particularly in American classrooms, where it has been widely taught for decades – as the canonical work on the dark side of the American Dream, which Miller treats as a self-destructive fantasy. And his play devastatingly exposes the fragility of mid-twentieth century American masculinity by exploring the emasculating – even suicidal – brutalities of failed class striving.

Farhadi’s “The Salesman” is much more than a restaging of Miller’s play in Iran, which was apparently popular before the 1979 Revolution. In his hands the train wreck of the Loman’s lower-middle class aspirations is made both “familiar and strange,” refracted in the unfolding tragedy of his Iranian couple Emad and Rana. Farhadi’s play powerfully conveys the tensions introduced by traditional conceptions of marriage, gender, and male honor in contemporary Iran. Post-WWII New York City and post-Revolution Tehran are two very different times and places. But Farhadi deftly and dialogically explores such issues as violence against women in patriarchal societies, when ambition meets humiliation, and the costs of a loss of trust in peoples’ private lives. The juxtaposition of “The Salesman” with “Death of a Salesman” complicates and enriches, while building a bridge between, how Iranians and Americans understand the upheaval that can follow when traditional social relationships are undermined during moments of rapid expansion of capitalist modernity. As Farhadi and Miller remind us, families are sacrificed.

Another celebrated Iranian artistic engagement with – for lack of a better term – *Western* popular culture is Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel and memoir, Persepolis. Originally written in French and offering international readers a glimpse of teenage rebellion inside Iran’s revolutionary period and its aftermath, Persepolis has come to be widely taught in the US, at both the high school and college levels. The graphic novel and its highly-praised film adaptation have also generated public responses in Iran and in the US. The Iranian government denounced Persepolis as promoting an inaccurately negative account of its Revolution, while the graphic novel was among the top ten most challenged books in the US in 2014, according to the American Library Association, for various perceived offenses, including its depictions of gambling, use of offensive language, and political viewpoint.

But Persepolis is an intercultural tour de force. Satrapi’s autobiographical protagonist constantly appropriates and experiments with Western cultural artifacts and influences in pursuit of her own DIY personal style, even as the graphic novel opens spaces of understanding about the revolutionary period for non-Iranians. In the novel itself and through interviews, Satrapi has highlighted a welter of cultural sources, including: the pop singer Kim Wilde, Bruce Lee, Godzilla, American comic books, the song “Eye of the Tiger,” The Terminator, Michael Jackson, Art Spiegelman, Casablanca and other American classics, the Italian film The Bicycle Thief, Iggy Pop, feminism, Marxism, Fritz Lang, Nosferatu, and Nike sneakers, among other inspirations. Marji, the graphic novel’s iconoclastic main character, regularly expresses anti-authoritarian Punk-like sensibilities while embracing her many contradictions as a “veil-wearing Marxist anarchist.”

But this is not a story of the triumph of Western cultural consumerism. Marji’s restless cultural mixing and matching have a personal and local resonance. Her novel appropriation of Punk style is altogether something else than what a reader, familiar with expressions of Punk subculture in the UK and US in the late-1970s, might expect. In New York or London, Punk was variously associated with anti-authoritarian often nihilistic disdain for popular music and mainstream consumer society, as a critique of political idealism and often as a typically un-PC expression of race and class antagonisms characteristic of late industrial capitalism. If Satrapi’s protagonist expresses a similarly rebellious anti-authoritarian and DIY sensibility, for her Punk offers a form of resistance to the Iranian regime and a kind of proto-feminism, for which themes of race or nihilism are largely irrelevant. In post-revolutionary Iran Punk is, ironically, associated with American consumer goods, including such notably un-Punk – at least in the US of the late-1970s – items as Nike sneakers and the song “Eye of the Tiger.” Satrapi offers the reader her DIY style as an alternative to stock images of Iran as “fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism,” so often presented in the US news media. Punk style, in Satrapi’s world, helps us to appreciate this, even as we also recognize the appropriative contortions of transnational youth subcultures in action.

Farhadi and Satrapi are just two contemporary Iranian cultural producers. But they help us understand some critical benefits of the border-crossing global conversations enabled by circulating national cultural content, in direct tension with the nativist moment we’re living at present. US cultural agencies used to incentivize projects like the NEA’s Southern Exposure program to bring little-known performing artists from Latin America to the US in order to encourage creative relationships between US artists and their counterparts to the south. But analysts, too preoccupied with zero-sum market penetration where the extent of circulation of US cultural goods and services – for better or worse – exhausts the implications of their transnational movement, often unconstructively privilege a “world is flat” conception of cultural globalization. And current domestic US debates about the politics of cultural appropriation, with their tendency to celebrate the patrolling of identity boundaries, don’t help.

What Trumpists, analysts of globalization, and today’s cultural cops all often disregard is the extent to which the pervasive global circulation, appropriation, and repurposing of US popular culture continues to be a source of global relevance of the US as “good to think with,” and way for others elsewhere in the world to express their agency. These appropriations service a transnational cultural dialogue, bridging geopolitical frontiers and pointing to shared experiential horizons, while making differences relatable. Such uses of US cultural content for diverse local ends help to maintain the possibilities for a “mutual tuning-in relationship,” in Alfred Schutz’s words. They give us all a variously imagined and re-imagined but shared topic of conversation. In a world of ascendant nationalisms and nativisms, these are conversations we need to encourage.

Most often associated with Alec Ross’s stint at the State Department as Senior Advisor for Innovation, diplomacy’s rush to better leverage the advantages of social media and mobile technologies by investing in ediplomacy and PD 2.0 is no secret. On his first day as new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs last February, Richard Stengel made his position clear: social media are “transformational tools” and the State Department needs to move toward a “digital-first strategy.” Ambassadors now tweet regularly. Out of a desire to “make foreign policy less foreign,” even Secretary of State John Kerry tweets. And the State Department is now running what a 2012 Brookings report described as a “global media empire.”

But if digital diplomats extoll the reach and connectivity offered by social media platforms, less attention is given to what they think these advantages mean in practice, that is, the world view of digital diplomacy. A late April summit in D.C. on the “Future of Diplomacy,” hosted by the Diplomatic Courier and the United Nations Foundation, was an opportunity to contemplate how diplomacy and technology meaningfully intersect. The summit offered the chance to hear the views of digital diplomats and, as Craig Hayden has encouraged, to assess prevailing attitudes and assumptions among public diplomacy practitioners about the uses, value, and efficacy of social media platforms for their work.

The event’s main conclusion appeared to be that, despite enthusiasm for social media, diplomacy “will always be built on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions.” This was odd, given who was convened for the event. Partners included +SocialGood, a “global community of innovators” seeking to harness “the power of technology and new media to make the world a better place,” and the Digital Diplomacy Coalition, a group created to share “ideas and best practices to leverage digital technologies.” One of two co-sponsors was RedTouchMedia, a company that has developed an anonymous distribution platform for digital content delivery. Panelists included staffers responsible for digital diplomacy for the embassies of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Italy, as well as the director of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government, and a curator from Frequency540, a strategic communications agency dedicated to digital analytics. The vibe throughout was one of enthusiasm for diplomacy’s digital present and increasingly digital future. So why the old-school conclusion?

Clues were sprinkled throughout panelists’ comments. Israel’s embassy staffer described social media platforms as “non-hierarchical” places where people can be “open and spontaneous.” Frequency540’s representative characterized social media-enabled relationships as “informal.” He referenced the ubiquitous selfie as an example of the “humanization” effect of social media, where people expect more direct access to opinion-makers. Panelists identified social media platforms with the opportunity for “authentic storytelling.” The Microsoft representative noted how these platforms enable more “substantive conversations,” which show the human side of diplomacy’s work. Social media users expect “real, approachable, people,” it was explained, and so, neither “surrogates” nor “automated agents” pass muster. These “won’t be authentic.”

In other words, public diplomacy professionals registered enthusiasm for social media’s evident promise of greater authenticity of self-presentation as a basis for diplomatic communication. In this post-Snowden era of the leak, a comparable note is sounded with calls for greater “transparency” in U.S. government use of Internet-based technologies and information – especially given revelations of massive data-mining and the new likelihood that any “gap between its actions and words” will eventually be exposed. In April panelists similarly celebrated social media tools as a means to close “the gap between our values and how we carry them out.” The parallel is between a Snowden-type exposure of hypocrisy and the perception of inauthentic communication. Throughout the summit social media was associated with authenticity, in turn, equated with the congruence of values with words with deeds.

In this context the summit’s conclusion about face-to-face interactions as an enduring cornerstone of public diplomacy becomes better understood. However, at a moment of attempted stealth cuts to the Fulbright program, the uncritical celebration of social media hipness, embraced by practitioners as an attractive opportunity for more direct communication with public diplomacy’s critical subject populations, is puzzling. The breezy elision of social media with greater self-authenticity, in particular, advances a deeply flawed account of social media’s potential for diplomacy.

Left unconsidered were the ways that social networking sites, or the next trending social app, are in no way direct forms of communication but instead technologically mediated platforms with parameters that significantly determine the possibilities for social interaction and the performative choices for self-construction. The selfie is firstly an artifact of front-facing cellphone cameras, and increasingly “carefully curated, filtered, posed, and polished,” in the words of one commentator, a “manufactured self” newly popularized by the enthusiasm for snapchatting and related trends. Social media-driven relationships are, in other words, very far from face-to-face and any appreciation of authenticity on these platforms cannot be considered apart from their particular presentational possibilities.

And social media can be manipulated in non-transparent ways. Examples abound. A recently uncovered cyber-espionage campaign by Iranian hackers included creating more than a dozen “fake personas” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and elsewhere, as well as fake online news services, to build online relationships with targets for spear-phishing messages. One summit panelist described his embassy’s creation of a fake LinkedIn page for Iran’s president Rouhani which was then retweeted widely with the intent to “shift the conversation” away from Rouhani’s moderate credentials. Commentators have noted the Twitter war over Ukraine, with its incomplete, one-sided, distorting, and often false information sharing.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team does not simply debate America’s critics on Twitter, but also hijacks hashtags and spoofs propaganda videos. Lines between hacking, trolling, and debating get fuzzy. Then there was the USAID-funded “Cuban Twitter,” or ZunZuneo, a secret program using cell phone text messaging to create a critical mass of subscribers – never aware of the U.S.’s role – intended as a direct line to regular Cubans in order to eventually introduce controversial political content. Finally, we witnessed the Stephen Colbert fake Twitter controversy, where satire led to “real” if misinformed online protest.

These are all examples of non-transparent social media-enabled fakery, where words and deeds veer in different directions, operators use “self-presentation” deceptively, and distinctions between diplomacy and espionage become taxed. Social media effectively amplifies propagandistic reportage of contentious events and conceals ulterior motives because there is typically little context accompanying content, but also because the particular source behind a given cybercampaign is not immediately identifiable. Social media is aptly described as a dimension of what Jean Baudrillard – an astute observer of popular culture – called “hyperreality,” his term for an increasing inability to distinguish reality from simulations of it. Social media interactions amplify the effects of hyperreality, not the other way around.

In the post-Snowden era, social media denizens are well aware that their personal data are collected by governments and corporations for uses other than their own. By ignoring these regular manipulations of the technological backstage, the naive authenticity expressed by digital diplomats seems disingenuous. Why take it seriously? It distracts attention from the self-consciously made-up and manipulated: hallmarks of social media’s technologically-enabled platforms for “interested” communication and the recruitment of followers. We are better off, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller has put it, remaining attentive to the ways in which social media “authenticity is created out of fakery.”

An earlier version of this post appeared on USC’s CPD blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/inauthenticity-and-tweet-tweet-digital-diplomacy.

Frameworks for cultural diplomacy in the U.S. are often too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, self-identified practitioners of cultural diplomacy – within and outside government – tend to identify, if somewhat generically, specific exportable forms of expressive culture (think: music, theater, literature, dance, murals, or film). Particularly for government-sponsored cultural diplomacy programming, these expressive forms are often represented by celebrity practitioners of the art in question, who serve as cultural ambassadors in organized exchanges, international tours, or one-off happenings. Hence, Satchmo, Dave Brubeck, Roy Lichtenstein, Yo-Yo Ma, Beyoncé, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the New York Philharmonic, Martha Graham, Ozomatli, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Franzen, and many others. As with the Fulbright and comparable programs, we have cultural diplomacy as direct and intimate encounters among citizens of different nationalities.

On the other hand, we continue to discuss cultural diplomacy in much more encompassing geopolitical terms, as soft power, aided and abetted by the ongoing realities of cultural globalization. In this mode we tend to assume, often not in specifically grounded ways, the global circulation of cultural content as goods and services and with a growing proportion of content taking digital form. Hence, Hollywood, Nashville, Silicon Valley, network T.V., fast food, video gaming, and New York University. For better or worse, depending upon the commentator, the U.S. is generally credited with a tremendous – if gradually shrinking – advantage, given the comparatively unparalleled volume of cultural content it produces and distributes for global consumption, particularly in the audiovisual sector. In this case we have cultural diplomacy as global, if nationalized, consumer experience.

There is a vast scalar difference between these two applications of culture for diplomacy. The first is often described as people-to-people diplomacy, designed and implemented to interact with a relatively small and well-defined set of target audiences. The second engages amorphously with publics variously defined and largely beyond any dedicated program to shape specific outcomes, though often included as one factor in nation branding. But just as it designs and promotes programs of cultural exchange, the U.S. government will move to defend its perceived soft power advantages, if threatened. This was the case several years back when U.S. trade representatives unsuccessfully sought to check a push through UNESCO to limit the presence of American cultural goods and services in other national markets, in the form of the 2005 Cultural Diversity Convention.

If U.S. government-sponsored cultural diplomacy and the soft power-type circulation of culture operate on different scales, discussion of their significance by U.S. public diplomacy practitioners and commentators nevertheless exhibits a common feature: an orientation toward assessment of the effects of U.S. culture upon other people, countries, or global publics. What happens, goes the question, when expressive culture performed, produced, or organized for export and distribution by U.S. citizens, the government, civil society, corporations, or industries, circulates outside of the U.S. for consumption by non-Americans? A connected, often taken-for-granted, question is: In what ways does such cultural diplomacy messaging or outreach benefit the U.S. or advance national interests?

I’ve put this simplistically to highlight again a point I’ve made before: the extent to which discussions of the significance of cultural diplomacy in the U.S. continue to maintain a lopsided view of communication and exchange, paying almost exclusive attention to the possible ways expressive culture produced in the U.S. is delivered, consumed, and influences non-Americans. But such an orientation is, at best, only half of the equation, and a suspect half at that, given the massive volume of global cultural flows constantly moving across porous national boundaries. Even so, a more rounded account of the effects of cultural diplomacy would give more attention to the ways diverse forms of expressive culture not originating in the U.S. are consumed in the U.S. and shape this country’s cultural dialogue with the world.

Or not, as the case may be. Only three percent of everything published in the U.S. each year is translated from another language. And the majority of that vanishingly small total is technical manuals. As a Nobel committee member noted, Americans “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” The U.S. literary scene of authors, journalists, publishers, and readers is insular and isolated. Contemporary global literature is largely absent in the lives of Americans. As journalist Anna Clark has recently made the case, this alarming literary insularity amounts to a “roadblock to global discourse.” This lack of access to the rest of the world’s published creative output decreases the likelihood of Americans sharing overlapping histories and conversations with readers elsewhere. It becomes harder to imagine other cultural worlds or construct common goals.

We are unnecessarily limiting our imaginative lives. As Clark describes, the reasons for this are several. The U.S. publishing industry actively discourages literary translation. It marginalizes the translator, for which there are few incentives or financial rewards. American universities similarly devalue the work of translation as not sufficiently “original,” and so not helpful toward tenure. As such, translators often publish under pen names. Universities are, too, cutting back on foreign language education. Beyond a few small independent presses, books in translation remain on the industry’s fringe. Large publishing houses resist publishing them. When published they are also often subsidized by foreign governments. Writers from poorer countries that cannot afford to subsidize their authors are left out of the literary translation market altogether, no matter how outstanding.

This is only incidentally a rant about the blinkered U.S. publishing industry. Here I want instead to draw some conclusions for cultural diplomacy. To repeat: our cultural diplomacy frameworks are too narrow and too broad. With few exceptions, discussions of soft power lack context or grounding in any specific public or set of social relations. We assume the mysterious workings of cultural globalization to work in our favor. People-to-people exchange is restricted to particular partners, events, or programs, instead of broader considerations of the circulation of culture through publics. And regardless of scale, we assume culture to be an instrument to persuade others rather than a dialogic beachhead. Meanwhile, people in the U.S. are most likely unaware that they have been largely shut out from, in this case, a global print-based conversation.

But the peculiarities of the U.S. publishing industry remind us that so-called global cultural flows do not simply circulate. They flow disjunctively: directed, shaped and sometimes inhibited by what we might call mediating structures of interlocution, composed of combinations of: industry practice, investment, legal frameworks, collaborative networks, business models, consumer preferences, and value chains, which, taken together, make up particular corners of the global creative economy, like publishing. And as new social cataloguing web applications like Library Thing suggest, these structures are not at all static, but can enable new alignments among authors, readers, translators, libraries, and publishers.

If the goal of cultural diplomacy is to facilitate constructive conversation, it becomes necessary to attend to the mediating structures that in effect patrol the shape of national and global cultural traffic. The U.S. publishing industry composes only one such point of mediation. These mediating structures are where national industries concretely intersect with the global economy, found in between often amorphous publics referenced by soft power and particular partners of cultural exchange. And yet, they significantly determine the possible shapes of the cultural conversations we are, and are not, able to have.

This post first appeared on USC’s CPD blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_diplomacy_of_and_by_the_book/

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.

At its inception IARPA was tasked with developing better ways, in USA Today-speak, to “help analysts measure cultural habits of another society.” And its portfolio continues to sponsor research intended to develop big data-type tools to process the linguistic and cultural information of countries, societies and communities of interest to US espionage. While there are anthropologists who work along the frontier between their discipline and the rapidly emerging computational social sciences, it is unlikely that many anthropologists would approach cultural analysis in the terms currently pursued by IARPA. The agency’s formulations of cultural problems likely strike most social scientists as well outside of, or as at odds with, the standard or prevailing disciplinary usages of this concept, including the concept’s basic significance and what legitimately can be done with it. But, it is often the case – and unfortunately so – that there is scant traffic of any kind between academic anthropology and the IC, even when there are clearly things to talk about, like the culture concept.

A Public Anthropology of the IC?

In the era of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, journalists have increasingly sought to shine a light on “top secret America,” to borrow Dana Priest’s phrase. And public debate has in large part focused on the new circumstances of privacy (or the lack thereof), clandestine data collection, and the ethics of new largely internet-based and social media-derived means used by intelligence agencies to amass colossal troves of information while mining people’s online signatures. Much less often considered, if at all, is whether the sociological or anthropological theory – the tissue of ideas and concepts underwriting these programs – actually makes any sense.

Instead, the vast majority of attention is given to extolling and further exploring the possibilities for data collection opened up by new computational and social media technologies. Too often, wide-ranging and critically grounded academic discussion and debate has played virtually no part in how these programs are conceived and implemented. A lack of more substantive dialogue about the social science informing IARPA’s programs, and the possibility of skewed or flawed results built upon misguided or unexamined assumptions, is a serious problem with the potential to negatively and mischievously – but perhaps not altogether obviously – influence intelligence priorities in the US, and if indirectly, the country’s foreign policy footprint.

IARPA’s several culture-focused programs point to the need for more critical discussion among social scientists about IARPA-style social science and related priorities of security and intelligence agencies, a discussion which could at once address and more trenchantly appraise the particular assumptions (and social scientific world view) underwriting such projects, their limits, and the ways that questionable or debatable concepts and practices with traction in the social science of the securityscape are potentially relevant, defensible, or ill-conceived. This is a conversation that should also include the IC itself. But this is not a conversation that social scientists outside the IC either are regularly aware of, want, or perhaps even know how to have, with a few exceptions.

When academic social scientists do address the social science of the securityscape, the prevailing approach is to take issue with the politics and ethics of social scientific involvement with the present version of the military industrial complex, advanced from a position well outside this work and often at a considerable distance from the specific details – and many of the implications – of it. But we also need more grounded and zoomed-in discussion about the epistemologies, research designs, data, analysis, and conclusions drawn by this work, and associated implications, which take account of the ways this realm of social scientific ideas and concepts also drives IC priorities and outcomes in ways sometimes constructive but perhaps at least as often, problematic. If such discussions sometimes do take place, they need to be broader, deeper, more inclusive, and sustained.

A program to measure cultural habits suggests a quantitative approach to a hermeneutical problem, which, at the very least, takes for granted a very different conception of culture as a source of insight than the various ways that anthropologists usually engage with this concept. These differences are not trivial. “Culture” is a concept from which US anthropology notably retreated in the 1990s and which the discipline has continued to qualify in multiple ways, while for the IC interest in “socio-cultural factors” – often as cultural intelligence and as enlisted in exercises of prediction – has been notable since the mid-2000s, if to various ends. The reasons why the IC and academic anthropology appear headed in opposite directions vis-à-vis the culture concept would certainly be a timely discussion.

Metaphor for the IC

Several of IARPA’s programs have attracted at least some journalistic attention of late as well, such as 2011’s Open Source Indicators program. But here I consider instead IARPA’s Metaphor Program, also launched in 2011, because it is a particularly revealing example of the recent technologically-enhanced version of the cultural turn by the US intelligence community. Most simply, a “metaphor” is a linguistic relationship of similarity, where one experiential domain (the target) is understood by way of reference to another (the source). Astronomer Fred Hoyle coining the term “big bang” to refer to one theory for the origin of the universe is a case in point. IARPA’s program aspires to provide decision-makers with a more systematic understanding of the “shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures” by compiling a given culture’s metaphors and making these available to intelligence analysts.

My questions about this objective are several, if connected: As part of a larger IC project for culture, what does “metaphor” currently mean to the US intelligence community? And, given what “metaphor” means for the IC, how does this understanding influence the ways the IC might conceptualize specific cultures or foreign publics of interest? And what, in turn, might this mean for the footprint of the US intelligence community, as it offers policy decision-makers a particular account of global geopolitics, at least in part informed – if indirectly and in ways most likely invisible to any given decision-maker – by programs like this one?

IARPA’s solicitation for its Metaphor Program promotes the goal of a better understanding of “the tacit backdrop against which members of a culture interact and behave,” or the patterned “cultural norms” which compose the “worldviews of particular groups or individuals.” And metaphors are the program’s choice because they are both “pervasive in everyday language” and, IARPA assumes, metaphors “shape how people think about complex topics.” More importantly, IARPA understands metaphors to “reduce the complexity of meaning” because their usage is patterned.

As the program’s manager, Heather McCallum-Bayliss, observed, “Culture is a set of values, attitudes, knowledge and patterned behaviors shared by a group.” IARPA’s conception of metaphor is assumed to be a key to understand cultures, in large part because cultures, in turn, are understood – channeling the ghost of Ruth Benedict – as patterned and shared group behavior. Such a preference for disciplinarily obsolete but hyper-coherent conceptions of culture like Benedict’s in the broader military and security environment is far from unique. And a consistent preference for such starting points is telling about IARPA’s objectives and the computational steps it intends to take to achieve them.

IARPA is investing in research on metaphors because it is convinced such research has the potential to uncover the “inferred meanings,” “conventional understandings” and “underlying concepts that people share,” thus allowing the intelligence community to gain better analytic purchase on identified “cultures of interest,” but more importantly for the agency, on the “decision-making and perception of foreign actors.” To this end, IARPA’s approach to metaphor is largely derived from one influential story about metaphor most closely related to the species of cognitive linguistics associated with George Lakoff and colleagues. And Lakoff, it turns out, is not coincidentally, a member of a research team now working to develop a multilingual metaphor repository with IARPA funding from its Metaphor Program.

Lakoff’s Tristes Tropes

So, first we need to know a few things about the Lakovian approach to metaphor, since there are other contenders in the scholarly field of trope theory. If beginning with his influential Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with Mark Johnson in 1980, in recent years Lakoff has also established a reputation as a public intellectual of sorts, applying his metaphor-heavy analytic hand to the US political landscape. In his most recent incarnation, Lakoff has used his approach to metaphor to support the progressive cause, and has often presented his work in the form of guides, handbooks and toolkits instead of as research. But, while Lakoff’s heart might lie with progressives, his conception of metaphor is deeply conservative, as I make the case below. And this has direct consequences for IARPA’s program, taking for granted as it does the Lakovian world view on metaphor.

Here’s Lakoff’s take on metaphor, in a nutshell. As he explains, conceptual metaphors – which typically employ a more abstract concept (e. g. politics) as a target and a more concrete topic (e. g. family) as a source – shape the ways we think and act, and underwrite a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear more directly on the surface of our language use, which Lakoff calls linguistic metaphors. If much more can be said about this, here’s the rub so far as IARPA is concerned: conceptual metaphors are the key for understanding how speakers – typically, members of the same “culture” – systematically map relationships between conceptual domains. Mapping in the Lakovian mode refers to the patterned set of correspondences that exist between source and target domains.

While there is good reason to assume that the map is not the same as the territory, one imagines that IARPA sees potential in such a mapping exercise because maps promise empirical predictability. Another probable attraction is that Lakoff’s work on metaphor has, in recent years, become increasingly slanted toward neuroscience. He now describes “neural metaphorical mappings,” where metaphors are “fixed in the brain” along “pathways ready for metaphor circuitry.” Lakoff’s marrying of cognitive linguistics to neuroscience has transformed a woolly term from the humanities – metaphor – into a building block for a new “neural theory of metaphor,” now presented as a scientific tropology, in ways conversant with a growing obsession across US military and security agencies with the potential of neuroscience.

Machines Learning Metaphors

IARPA’s Metaphor Program is, essentially, about combining emerging techniques and technologies in computational modeling with cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor like Lakoff’s. At the Proposer’s Day brief explaining its new metaphor program, IARPA described linguistic metaphors as “realizations of the underlying pattern or systematic association of abstract concepts” – a set of relationships IARPA assumes to be “defined by mapping principles.” IARPA would like to be able to data-mine online textual data on a large scale, as a “rich source for identifying cultural beliefs” about key societies of interest, and to develop new automated techniques to identify, map and then analyze the metaphorical language of entirely online native-language text. (I won’t take up here why online text – as a particular technological platform, set of expressive conventions, and kind of performance – is unlikely to be unproblematically representative of peoples’ cultural beliefs.)

What is critical for evaluating this project is making sense of the conviction that the relationship, for example, between a given metaphoric target and source (e. g. understanding “government corruption” as a “disease”) is conventional and predictably mappable; or that the development of unsupervised machine learning of such metaphor mappings is possible; and that this will then enable computational metaphor identification and categorization, as part of a “metaphor repository,” a database IARPA would build and maintain for a given language; against which analysts will eventually and ideally be able to compare “real-life statements” to predict intentions of people who may represent a threat to the US. (The agency has identified American English, Farsi, Russian and Mexican Spanish as initial languages of interest.)

For IARPA’s program to be successful, a basically Lakovian approach to metaphor has to be uncritically accepted as correct: linguistic metaphors, assumed to be representative and available in large numbers at the surface of online native-language texts, will be massively mined; their relationships of source to target, it is further taken for granted, will be able to be systematically reliably mapped; these analogical maps, goes the reasoning, will enable identification of more fundamental conceptual metaphors among cultures of interest; and this will allow analysts to infer relevant cultural patterns informing the behavior of foreign nationals; and perhaps even to help predict their likely decision-making on complex topics.

Lakoff on metaphor, in other words, has to be coded into the computational tools to be used to build the repositories before any such metaphors are even collected. And Lakovian-type metaphorical maps seem to be the extent of IARPA’s data-mining game. This is to say, the theoretical starting point and technological requirements of IARPA’s metaphor program are largely determinative of what “metaphor” can mean in this case. But, since a scholarly consensus about metaphor eludes us, and since one could choose to emphasize other features of the diverse work of metaphor, IARPA’s choices tell us perhaps more about its own world view than about anyone else.

Metaphor through the Looking Glass

Each metaphorical mapping in a given repository, we are told, will be validated using metrics designed to confirm “native-speaker knowledge of the metaphorical relations.” Such an idea works only if each language were a reliably monoglot standard, underwritten by conventional metaphoric associations recognized as such and in the same ways by any typical and competent native speaker. And so, each metaphor is at once culturally-specific – let’s set aside that languages and cultures are not the same – but also culturally entirely conventional. Yet the idea of native competence is an increasingly suspect one among linguists.

IARPA’s choices have consequences. As with its consistently topographical conception of culture, where patterned cultures can be organically decomposed into constituent and mappable relations of figure to ground, IARPA seemingly relies almost entirely upon the conventionality of metaphor. A consequence of its peculiar approach to metaphor and to culture as a limiting condition upon how people think, is that IARPA’s working conception of its notional publics – the people it is trying computational to figure out – is seriously limiting. IARPA is all in with a conception of metaphor, we might say, as stuck in the mode of mechanical solidarity, giving its attention to what are otherwise called “dead metaphors,” which, it can be argued, are in fact no longer really metaphors at all.

IARPA’s metaphor repositories would be cross-cultural collections of metaphoricized commonsense, that is, composed of already recognized and accepted metaphoric relations, informing the predictable parameters – maybe more accurately, limiting frames – of analogic reasoning of members of a given culture. This has the potential to be perversely conservative, since IARPA would understand decision-makers as drawing upon an identifiable cultural aggregate of figurative relationships which are always already assumed to exist. Such a situation makes of prediction, paraphrasing Yogi Berra, an exercise in déjà vu all over again.

Given Lakoff’s fashionable redressing of his approach to metaphor in the terms of neuroscience, and the ways a technologically-enhanced culture concept is being engineered by IARPA’s Metaphor Program as a difference engine keyed to cultural consensus, the conventional, and metaphoric persistence, it would not be hard to imagine analysts, as beneficiaries of this data and when considering how the people they study make decisions, adopting an analytic shorthand to refer to the “Russian brain” or “Farsi brain,” in ways reminiscent of a Cold War era fascination with American, Russian or German “modal personality types.” For many anthropologists, research scenarios like these are troubling because they raise a Levy-Bruhl-like specter of “how natives think,” troubling because also aggressively “othering.” A cynic might go even farther to suggest programs such as this one are developing technologies for “enemy-making.”

Metaphor’s Multiple Futures?

Ignored or sidelined in IARPA’s efforts are competing conceptions of metaphor. Ricoeur, to pick one, emphasized the ways that metaphors creatively transform language by revealing new ways to conceive of a referent. Metaphors generate and regenerate meaning. Black explored the open-endedness of metaphors, which he understood as too unstable to function referentially, but as introducing previously unavailable meanings in the dynamic interplay of figure and ground. Davidson remained unconvinced that metaphors could function as propositional at all, insisting instead that it was a mistake to assume metaphors possess any particular or stable “meaning.” These several conceptions of metaphor point to the limits of consensus around the conventionality of metaphor and the ways that backward-looking exercises in mapping and archiving metaphoric relations can fail to anticipate the future.

To take a case in point: Genetics historically has been a field shot through with metaphors. Metaphors describing the work of genes are particularly ubiquitous, including: map, code, blueprint, and recipe, where DNA is understood to “write” the hereditary possibilities for our biological future. The biologist Richard Dawkins’s influential concept of the “selfish gene,” for example, promotes a gene-centric theory of evolution, where human beings are mere vehicles for successfully self-propagating individual genes, as the architects of natural selection. But the success of Dawkins’s selfish gene metaphor is beginning to obscure the changing meaning of “gene,” including a growing variety of technical usages.

Researchers now emphasize the idea of a “post-genomic” biology, where combinations of networks of less selfish and more managerial genes are also influential, where “writing” can be less important than “reading,” and the relation of heredity to the environment appears increasingly complex and dynamic. But there are as yet no convincing off-the-shelf metaphors to describe what we continue to learn about the behaviors of genes. In other words, even given the technical and highly shared vocabulary among evolutionary biologists, the shape-shifting of genes under scientific inspection eludes easy description. And whatever might follow the selfish gene story is still emergent as a set of metaphors that cannot be mapped without significant distortion.

If sharply divergent from IARPA’s starting point, what these several conceptions of metaphor share is an attention to the arguments at the center of culture, to the work of metaphor for social shape-shifting, and where identity is always in motion in relationship to – paraphrasing William James – the blooming buzz of experience. They attend to the translational and problem-solving work of metaphor, and to the ways metaphor might animate new inquiry. Conceived in such ways, metaphors do not so much express similarity but create new relations among “unlike things.”

Accounts like these foreground the properties of metaphor as extensive rather than conventional, and as emergent rather than underlying. Concerned as they are with the ways that metaphors, in the words of anthropologist James Fernandez, are strategic predications upon the inchoate – that is, predications upon frontiers of life and experience that elude our ready classification – these offer alternatives to the conception of metaphor currently being reinforced in the social science of national security. And these alternatives run devastatingly counter to any possibility for a predictive tropology of the near future.